Noah Hawley on ‘Fargo,’ Comic Haircuts and Living in the Coen Universe

Once mostly anonymous, the producers who oversee top television series have sometimes become as well known as the actors who star in them. On occasion, The Times will pose questions from readers (and pose some of our own) to notable show runners, and post their responses. (Interviews are edited for clarity.)

Q. When you were originally pitching “Fargo,” did you run into any pushback from a network or even the Coens themselves at the idea for making this series? — Devan Suber, Atlanta

A. FX was already exploring making it into a series, so they asked me to come in and tell them how I might do it. I basically told them it’s not a series. The movie starts out saying it’s a true story, and at the end Marge has seen this crazy Coen brothers case. She goes to bed and her husband got the 3-cent stamp and tomorrow’s going to be a normal day, which is her reward for having persevered through the case. It seemed disingenuous to me that she would wake up tomorrow and have another crazy case. So I basically said the only way to do it would be an anthology, where very season is a different story with different characters, but that it all adds up to the same sort of feeling at the end of each 10 episodes.

Q. At what point did you know the second season was going to be a prequel set in a different decade?

A. In the second hour I wrote this anecdote for Keith Carradine, who played Molly’s dad, for him to say, basically just as a former cop, “I think I’ve seen something like what you’re seeing right now, and my advice is don’t go down that road. Because you can’t really turn around once you’re down it.” But it wasn’t until later in the year, as I sat down to write the last two scripts, that I realized that if we were going to do another season, that I could start setting something up that would pay off in the second year. So I included more allusions in Episodes 9 and 10 to the massacre at Sioux Falls and set up a few story points we’d have to match.

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Ted Danson, left, and Patrick Wilson in “Fargo.”CreditChris Large/FX

Q. You’ve talked about how you see the film and the different seasons of the show as various chapters in a Midwest true crime book. Have you started to think about what other chapters would look like?

A. I’m starting to think about it. What I look for is a jumping-off point. In our first year that was two men in an emergency room — one of them has a broken nose and is a very civilized man and the other is the opposite. That feels like a premise you could imagine in a Coen movie and the questions become, who are these two guys? How did the guy’s nose get broken and what happens after they meet? The second year started with, a woman drives home with a man sticking out of her windshield and starts dinner for her husband. Who’s the woman and the husband? Who’s the man in the windshield how did he get there? And what happens after? That’s what I would be looking for in a third iteration. What’s the catalyst?

Q. Was it based on the actual case of the woman who ran over a guy and left him in her windshield?

A. It’s based on a vague memory of the event. I didn’t go back and research the facts of that case. It’s the sense that truth is stranger than fiction, and that seemed right for us to play with.

Q. So far this season, it seems like everyone’s “bad” behavior is due to being victims of circumstance. I know this is “Fargo,” but in your world, do practically all people do the wrong thing? Is this your way of saying anyone is capable of violence when they think that’s the only way out? If so, I better get a meat grinder. — Steve C., Hunt Valley, Md.

A. There is the moral spectrum in “Fargo,” and you see it in other Coen brothers movies, where you have a very good character on one end and a very bad character on the other. Then in the middle, certainly with Jerry Lundegaard or Lester Nygaard, there’s someone who is on the fence — a sort of ordinary person who shows us that they’re capable of even greater evil than the villain, on some level. Billy Bob [Thornton] and I used to laugh because people would refer to him as the protagonist of the show, where he’s clearly the villain. They loved him but they hated Lester. Everyone knew Malvo was a scorpion so we could sort of root for him to be bad, but when we met Lester, he was wearing human clothes, so we felt betrayed.

Q. You’ve had people like Ted Danson, Bob Odenkirk, Jordan Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Brad Garrett and Martin Freeman play roles in both seasons of “Fargo.” Do you consciously look for actors with comedic backgrounds, given the dark humor in both the show and the film? — Eduardo Ramos, Chicago

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Noah HawleyCreditFrederick M. Brown/Getty Images

A. I love that it’s the kind of storytelling that supports both great dramatic and great comedic actors, but we’re not necessarily using them in the way that you would expect. When we got Bob Odenkirk, for example, I think everyone sort of thought, ‘Well this character is the comic foil.’ We realized over the 10 hours he’s actually the moral heart of the show, and had this very dramatic arc and was one of the more tragic characters in the season. So when we cast Mr. Key and Mr. Peele or Brad Garrett or Nick Offerman, the role is not just be funny, funnyman.

Q. What aspects of the Coens’ oeuvre most appeal to your own sensibilities? — Nick, New York

A. “Fargo” is a tragedy with a happy ending. So you need to have that tragic underpinning, that all of this could be avoidable and that’s what makes it tragic. It’s about the use of violence, and the fact that the tension in anticipation of violence and the tension in anticipation of a laugh are sort of the same.

Q. What is your approach to incorporating explicit Coen references?

A. Some of the homages are built into character dynamics. For example certainly with Karl (Mr. Offerman) and Sonny (Dan Beirne) there’s an echo of “Lebowksi,” with John Goodman and Steve Buscemi. It’s not explicit but it’s familiar and comforting to an audience on some level. At other times we’ll have a homage that sets up an expectation. At the end of Season 1 when we jumped ahead a year, suddenly Molly was pregnant, and we had a pregnant woman and a villain in a cabin. She’s going out there to search for him and subconsciously you’re expecting what happens in the movie, and part of you wants that to happen because it was so satisfying in the movie. So when you do something different it creates a tension — the opposite happens and that’s surprising.

Then there are little pieces here and there — Mike Zoss Pharmacy, or some other smaller Easter eggs for the hard-core fans to find. I never want it to feel heavy-handed or cute. I do sort of agonize over them because I never want to feel like I’m overdoing them, or being too precious about it, or drafting off work I haven’t earned.

Q. Did you feel any additional nervousness or pressure after the success of the first season, and the 18 Emmy nominations? — Daphne Ace

A. I would have to, right? But the pressure I put on myself was creative pressure. It was, O.K., this one is very different from the last one so what’s the best execution of this particular story? That became a much more doable task than to try to compete with the commercial or critical success we had in the first year. That’s not something you can consciously duplicate.

Q. Who chooses the music and how does the music, often quirky, drive a story line? — Phil Telford, Dallas

A. A great music supervisor named Maggie Phillips helps me find music. A lot of it is things I found as well, like, for instance, the Jeff Wayne “War of the Worlds” disco opera that ends the second episode. That was something I found and it just seemed too good to be true. A song like “Children of the Sun,” that Billy Thorpe song, that was in the script, the idea of building a sequence in the premiere to that song. Yes it’s 1979, but because it’s 1979 in the Midwest, it’s also kind of 1974. But it’s also kind of 1962 and 1948 at the same time, do you know what I mean? There are people like Jesse Plemons’s character, who really just wants to go back to the ’50s and be his parents. So we have a Burl Ives song that goes with him, over the montage of Ed cleaning up the garage. What I loved about that one was it starts as a comic throwback song about this guy, who’s trying to get away from this posse, and then in the end he’s singing in a very soulful way. “May the Lord have mercy on my soul,” as Ed is trying to get the blood out of the floor. It becomes a very emotional and tragic moment. When one piece of music can do that, that’s a great find.

A. That’s the rumor going around. I can neither confirm nor deny it, that’s all I’ll say. Another way we create synchronicity with the Coen movies is to repurpose a piece of music you might have heard. In our first year I had our composer do a version of “Ode to Joy,” Beethoven’s Ninth, that in “Raising Arizona” was done with yodeling and banjo. We did the steel drums version of it. You may notice a couple others throughout this season.

Q. When are we going to understand the alien stuff in the show, or even see aliens? — Eduardo Rodrigues, Brumado, Bahia, Brasil

A. You want the exact minute? Like minute 36 in Episode 8?

Q. If you could be as specific as possible.

A. There are reasons that stuff is in there that tie into both the time period, the sort of American paranoia of the late ’70s, and into the Coen world. That concept you see in a lot of their movies: Accept the mystery. Also: Because it’s funny. Think of Javier Bardem’s haircut in “No Country for Old Men.” I know that they gave him that haircut and then laughed at his face for about 30 minutes. But there’s nothing funny about it in the movie. It’s eerie and unsettling. You see him with that haircut and it’s almost funny, but it’s also creepy because you literally just saw him sever a guy’s jugular. Billy Bob showed up with the haircut he had as Malvo, and I told him, “When you showed up with that haircut, I knew we were making the same movie.”

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Billy Bob Thornton in “Fargo.”CreditMatthias Clamer/FX

Q. Who would win in a fight between Anton Chigurh and Lorne Malvo? — Taylor Dorsett-Case, Leeds, U.K.

A. [Laughs.] I remember this old Japanese comic book, “Lone Wolf and Cub.” There’s this moment when two samurai meet on a road, and the whole comic is, in their heads, they see each version of the fight they would fight, and who would win. They never even have to fight. It feels like if Malvo and Chigurh met, they would both know that on some level it would be a draw, mutually assured destruction. It would be a moment between them. There is that archetype, that elemental figure, in the Coens’ work. The lone biker of the apocalypse, or Peter Stormare in “Fargo.” You’re almost not sure if they’re human or not. They may have been roaming this landscape since the time of the old gods. I think that’s interesting, and I certainly played into it with Malvo.

Q. Or they could all be the same entity.

A. It’s the devil in the Garden of Eden. That’s the other paradigm of “Fargo.” It’s always a story of basically decent people who are probably in over their heads, facing an evil that, on some level, they can’t even comprehend. How are they supposed to fight it? But they have to, so they do.

Q. What continuing role (if any) do the Coen brothers have in the development of the show? — Dr. James Rustles, Borneo

A. On a day-to-day level, they’re not involved. Mostly I try to be as respectful as possible, and keep them in the loop without pressuring them in any way. It’s like, here are the scripts and here are the episodes if you want to read or watch them. If you don’t, my feelings won’t be hurt.

Q. Have they ever nixed something you wanted to do?

A. No. I suppose they could. How odd it must be on some level: the show comes out and the bus ads are around, and they’re seeing “Fargo,” a movie that they made 20 years ago, has this new life as something they’re not really involved with, day to day. Sometimes I think of that, the Kafkaesque quality of what this experience must be for them.

Q. What is the best show on TV right now and why?

A. I remain a huge “Game of Thrones” fan. As someone said, it’s certainly the most show on TV right now. They’ve managed, in a genre world, to create something that completely works as a drama as well. I really liked “Mr. Robot” this summer. I thought that was a great start toward trying to do something different on TV, cinematically and story-wise, monkeying around with the unreliable narrator and everything.